But, there is one major difference in the drought of 2012... there's relatively no dust.

I remember my grandfather talking about the Dust Bowl and saying he couldn't see the sun for days. He lived in southeast Ohio, yet some of that soil he saw in the sky was from Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.

We certainly see a very different story today. While there have been reports of massive dust storms [4]in Arizona and similar desert climates, there has been relatively no evidence of dust storms in the Midwest in 2012. So, if our 2012 drought is similar in size and intensity to those of the 1930s, what happened to the dust this time?

For one, the Dust Bowl era experienced multiple years of droughts over a very large area. While much of Texas and Oklahoma have been in a drought for multiple years, most of the remaining Midwest has not.

I think a second factor is how management of the soil has changed since the 1930s.

In my opinion, farmers across this nation learned from the mistakes of the Dust Bowl. Farmers planted tree lines, established sod waterways and filter strips, and reduced tillage or eliminated tillage.

Farmers identified that some soils never should have been in annual crops and returned them to perennial grazing lands.